From Massachusetts and Florida to Montana and Alaska, with each chapter, both conservative and liberal readers will react...
Krebs (538 Ways to Live, Work, and Play Like a Liberal, 2010) seeks to paint a portrait of liberals living among the enemy, as it were, by choice.
As a campaign director for MoveOn.org and founder of Living Liberally, a national network of political social clubs, the author writes knowledgeably about people across the country—in Waukesha, Wisconsin; Little Elm, Texas; Fayetteville, Arkansas; Pawleys Island, South Carolina; Pomeroy, Iowa; and elsewhere—who have chosen to stay in a politically unwelcoming environment for a variety of reasons. For some, it’s home, where they were raised. For others, they state that it’s not so bad and that there are residents who, like them, think liberally but keep quiet about it. Many stay because moving to a big city, college, or coastal town is too much like giving up; plus, there’s no challenge there. The author proclaims that equating churches with conservatism is as wrong as equating atheists with liberalism. Furthermore, there are radicals in every way of thought, and liberalism is not immune. Some liberals quietly listen but stand up when called for, giving to and taking part in their communities. Others live provocatively, with bumper stickers and lawn signs for elections, always ready to jump into the fight. The majority love where they live, and they count on their neighbors and return the favor. One woman said her town was a great place to live; it just had no health care, maintained infrastructure, or working educational system. Another mentions that many of the residents think that the recycling program is a socialist plot. Throughout, Krebs approaches his subjects with candor and respect.
From Massachusetts and Florida to Montana and Alaska, with each chapter, both conservative and liberal readers will react strongly, but most will do nothing about it. Hopefully, however, the book will spur discussion and civic action.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59558-972-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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